14 DAY TRIAL // In a season where everything went wrong for the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, their technical team forgot to renew the official site's domain name at the worst time possible.
Dallas is hosting this year's Superbowl, so everybody was expecting the team to be the first one ever to play the NFL supreme game on its home turf.
Well, let's say this is truly a season for the ages, but not as fans expected.
After losing their starting quarterback, superstar Tony Romo, any chance of qualifying for this year's SuperBowl, and their head coach, the team temporarily lost their website Monday morning.
With 6 losses in their first 7 games, America's Team, a monicker the Cowboys are known under due to their huge fanbase and being the richest sport franchise in the World, suffered a shameful defeat against the Green Bay Packers in the Sunday night NFL primetime game.
Monday morning, the head-coach, Wade Philips was fired, triggering a media storm, everybody scrambling for information.
Absent from the party was their very own website, due mainly to a blunder in the Dallas Cowboys PR department.
In tone with their team, the marketing department simply forgot to perform a simple task and renew the domain name.
The domain name, registered with Network Solutions, was later brought back up, but the damage was already done, many users reporting the website still didn't work even a day after.
This was due to the fact that certain DNS servers already cached the generic Network Solutions page on which the domain name was listed as free. In a moment when everybody was accessing the site to find out why the coach was fired and who will replace him, the Cowboys didn't deliver, just like they did the entire year.
A year to forget indeed, but what's astonishing is the fact the any web hosting company out there, even the smaller ones with up to 100 clients usually send out many email to clients warning them about their domain expiry date.
According to CNBC, Network Solutions did send out lots of emails as well.
They even recognized the huge impact a domain pull-down would have on a media target like the Cowboys and allowed a week of grace for the domain to be renewed, since the actual domain expiry date was November 2nd.
Too bad that the contact email and phone were for Jerry Jones Jr., the team's Vice-President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, also son of the owner, a person maybe just to busy with some other more important tasks, like managing a team worth about $1.8 billion (according to Forbes).
A bill of $10-20 could have seemed as spam to him. For now, the domain name is up, next target: the team.